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Saturday, February 23, 2013

Sit-Coms, Ray Romano and MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE

Ray Romano and MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE

Sometime
during the era of Norman Lear's dominance over the television sit-com landscape
there arose a formula for writing scripts that haunts us still. I call it the "three lines to insult to
laugh track" gambit. It's
simple. Character A enters the scene
through what appears to be the kitchen or back door. She asks a question of character B, who is eating a bowl of
cereal. Character B guiltily evades the answer
to the question. Character C throws an
insult about Character B to Character A.
The insult is a clever quip exploiting Character B's weight or habits of
personal hygiene. The audience chuckles
(or canned laughter of the proper intensity is supplied.) Another character enters from the living
room and asks the same question, i.e. "Who drank all the milk?" Character A responds with a variation of the
same insult, but it's a little stronger.
Audience laughs again, a little more fulsomely.

Line one
is the exposition, it moves the story line along. Line two reveals the learned helplessness of a character. Line three insults that character. Then there's a laugh and the dialogue
returns to another insult, another laugh before the cycle returns to the
expository dialogue that moves the story another inch further along.

All the
laughs are from the insults or the escalation of the insults. These imply long audience familiarity with
the characters; the audience participates in the humor of the insults because
they are, in a sense, members of the family, entitled to

exchange barbs with the characters.

Shows
such as I LOVE LUCY were constructed differently. They were real Situation Comedies, i.e. Lucy would get herself
into a comic situation. The humor was
provided mostly by lies that Lucy told to Ricky. The lies were made necessary due to some transgression Lucy had
committed against one of Ricky's personal rules. Each lie led to further
complications as Lucy tried to protect herself from Ricky's notorious Latin
temper. The lies would lead to crazier
and crazier situations until Lucy's fib was unmasked. Yes, she broke Ricky's favorite bongo drum, yes she defied his
order not to audition for the part in a TV commercial. Somehow Ricky's temper never explodes. The audience knows that Ricky loves Lucy and
that he would never harm or abuse her.
Ricky's most fearsome outburst is "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to
do." He's merely playing the part of the fiery Cuban, in a time when
Cubans were still hot-blooded band leaders.
Lucy has never been in any real danger. The threat of danger, and Lucy's
fibs and their escalating complications to avoid this imagined danger are the
meat of the show's humor. The situation
is comic, as is Lucy's physical humor when she inexorably loses control of the
Situation.

I may
find I Love Lucy dated and no longer very funny, but I see a moral and
imaginative collapse in the quality of the formulaic nit-coms we see
today. Insult comedy is a venerable
stream in the great delta of comedic history.
Co-opting insult humor as the driving engine in the bottomless plethora
of mediocre sitcoms only serves to allow laziness to rule the writer's
room.

Producers
and writers seem to have learned nothing from the formula-busting brilliance of
Seinfeld. True, since Seinfeld's long
run on the air there is room for wackier premises and looser story structures,
but these too have played into the propensity for lazy writing. It's been an awfully long time since
anything as good as Seinfeld has appeared.

Ray
Romano has never been on my psychic radar.
I didn't watch his sitcom.

I don't watch many sitcoms for the reasons outlined
above. But Romano surprised me with his
beautifully calibrated drama series "MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE".

The
series revolves around three middle-aged men.
They are old buddies from high school and they meet at a restaurant
several days a week to eat breakfast and hash out their personal problems. Scott Bakula plays out-of-work actor Terry
Eliot. His boyish charm still works on
the ladies but it's proving to be an unreliable backstop for whatever pitches
the future may throw at him. At fifty, his face is falling and his prospects have dried up. When he's offered the role in an updated commercial that was once his
greatest hit, he cringes with embarrassment.
Instead he takes a job with the second old friend of the trio, Own
Thoreau, played by the redoubtable Andre Braugher.

Owen is
the son and heir to Big Daddy Owen Thoreau, the towering figure in one of Los
Angeles' venerable auto dealerships.
Owen Junior still calls his father "daddy" and is struggling
to overcome the iron-clad dominance of his monolithic father. "Daddy" is ready to retire and
hand the business over to his son. But
he makes it clear that he has no confidence in young Owen. He feels that his son doesn't have the drive
and charisma to sustain a competitive business. Owen Senior's pompous contempt for his son,
his constant undermining of younger Owen's efforts makes him the perfect bully
and the ideal target for an audience's wrathful involvement. He is what every good drama needs: a
villain.

Romano
plays Joe Tranelli, owner of a store specializing in party supplies. He's a compulsive gambler, recently divorced
and trying with all his heart to connect with his adolescent children.

These three
very different characters share breakfasts, jogs in the hills above L.A. and as
much intimacy as any American male can achieve.

Using
these simple ingredients, Romano has produced an absorbing drama that is
utterly lacking in strain, self consciousness and over acting. The obstacles and tensions each character
endures are convincing yet played with a precision that draws no attention to
itself.

This may
not be a series that will attract a younger audience looking for a high level
of stimulation. I may not have been
drawn to EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND but in the future I will be watching any
project with Ray Romano's name attached to it.
He's demonstrated a quiet mastery of television drama.

The
series went two seasons. That was all
it needed to achieve its goals. A third
season would have gone against the grain and defiled its own modest yet
profound ambitions.MEN OF A CERTAIN
AGE has no laugh tracks, no set-ups to predictable put-downs, no generic sitcom
kitchen-with-living-room set. It has,
instead, several great characters, three of whom are honestly struggling with
the onset of male middle age and its challenge. The series ended with satisfying resolutions
without ever seeming pat or forced. The
struggles of life would continue but these three men could rely on one another's
support. I can't think of a greater gift that can bestowed out of friendship. Support equates to a guarantee that in times of trouble your friends have "got your back."

About Me

A Midwesterner by birth, I migrated to the West Coast just in time to be a hippie but discovered that I related better to the Beatniks. I harkened back to an "old school" world of hard bop, Coltrane, jazz, poetry, painting and photography. A large part of my life went "off the rails" and I experienced the reality of the streets for too long. Putting myself back together was the defining experience of my life so far. It wasn't easy. It did, however, nurture the writer in me. I have written novels, memoirs, poems, humorous fake emails, and commercials

for ridiculous non existent products. I have a passion for astronomy, history, psychology, the pure abstract absurdity of human experience (what the hell is it?). My partner is an honest to god Animal Communicator, as nutty as that may sound to some people. She is the real deal. She also suffers from Fibro and it's a curse with which we must work every day. Come visit my blog and